What, you may wonder, is the most challenging kind of music both for composers to create and listeners to follow? Vast works for symphony orchestra or full chorus? — or a grand blending of both, like Handel’s “Messiah” or Beethoven’s monumental choral symphony? Nay, say I. If not these, then, perhaps large, lush chamber works for 8, 10 or 12 …
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A welcome treat awaits the young and the young of heart at the Mohawk Trail Concerts Series in Charlemont on Sunday, July 19, at 3 p.m., thanks to a visit by no less than Babar, that most gentlemanly of mythical pachyderms, in Francis Poulenc’s musical dramatization of Jean de Brunhof’s French children’s book …
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Editor’s note: Encores & Curtain Calls now runs every other week. “Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” — Henry James With such a plethora of summer musical performances, it’s good to have the big picture before focusing in on your …
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“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill oneself.” — Albert Camus Suicide is a dangerous word (from the Latin suicidium, sui + caedere, “to kill oneself”). The mere idea of suicide sets …
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“I love to go to a regular movie theater, especially when the movie is a big crowd pleaser. It’s much better watching a movie with 500 people making noise than with just a dozen.” — Steven Spielberg Now …
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“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” — Desmond Tutu If there’s any true hope for planet earth to move beyond the tribal chauvinism and the divisionalism that have, for millennia, …
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“No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.” — W.H. Auden When I was still an under-graduate at Queens College, my girlfriend Amy was horrified to learn that, as intimate …
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“Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.” — Barbara Grizutti Harrison, American writer While, …
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... in just spring, when the world is mud-luscious ... and puddle wonderful ...”— ee cummings As they say, “Getting there is half the fun.”In New York City, concert-going involves enduring the often-less-than-refreshing, not infrequently stressful transit to …
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There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit expresses through them all. — Corinthians 12:14 In the end, it really doesn’t seem to matter very much at all whether one’s instrument in life is a …
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“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice” — Ayn Rand A trio of beguilingly crafted puppets, choreographed to an archive of …
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